Conflict

We must support these children and pressure our governments to do the same. There is a strong humanitarian imperative for this, but it is also in our interests to avoid 1.6 million children in Iraq growing up with no education, huge burdens of trauma and no prospects.

We do not accept that violence against women and girls occurring in conflict is fundamentally separate from more everyday 'normal' forms of VAWG (like domestic violence). It all comes back to the way women are treated in society, with a premium placed on women's sexual purity as part of wider controls and discrimination on women's bodies, behaviour and appearance.

For over two decades, Somalia was known as a failed state- a state lacking effective government, controlled by warlords and terrorists and plagued by frequent phases of natural and man-inflicted disasters.

Voices and ideas from the areas of food, land, travellers, domestic violence, poverty, asylum and debt are all vital to finding grains of truth that allow us to face up to our Hidden Civil War. To face difficult truths in troubled times, we require deep collaboration, reflection and above all, listening.

During a visit to a summer camp for children affected by the conflict in Donbass, eastern Ukraine, I met a boy close to the frontline who had made a drawing of a tree, on top of which he drew a house with a family. When asked why the house was in the tree top and wouldn't it fall down in the wind, the boy confidently assured me 'no', the house is strong and secure. I later found out that this boy's dog had been killed by a landmine.

For the first time in the 70-year history of the UN, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has brought together world leaders and the humanitarian community for the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, with the aim of making bold commitments to reduce the impact of the unprecedented wars and disasters we are seeing today.

What do you have as your screensaver? While some companies allow staff to revel in their favourite sunset snap or their kids pulling hideous faces, others provide the screensavers to focus minds on the top priorities.

There is much at stake in Europe just now. The external environment is characterised by economic slowdown, the pressure of conflict, the refugee crisis, and the need to move rapidly to act on the Sustainable Development Goals, especially those related to climate. Urgent action is also needed to tackle the tax and transparency issues revealed by the Panama Papers. The threat of global disease epidemics is ever-present, with Ebola having been supplanted by the zika virus as the most urgent current threat. In all these arenas, the priority is coordinated action among groups of nations: another reason to put the global role of the EU high on the agenda.

How then do couples overcome the tyranny of anger and abuse so they can feel safe to tell the truth and connect? It's of course never easy because the roots of anger and frustration go way back and they are habits learned in our family of origin.

How can it be the case that peaceful protesters and campaigners are arrested for blocking a road, yet regimes that systematically oppress their own citizens and kill others in wars of aggression are given the red carpet treatment and plied with weapons?

We all know that if we are angry, critical, mean spirited and we shut each other out there is no good end to this kind of interaction. So why do we still do it? One answer is that we don't know better.

In the early hours of Saturday 2 April, a military escalation erupted on the Nagorny Karabakh line of contact, on a scale not seen since 1994. While the breakfast news reported on Palmyra, on who is planning to restore which monuments, the disturbing news broke about this old, yet now new conflict, that overnight saw dozens of people killed.

The shocking, sickening scene of a young man nailed to a wooden cross, surrounded by his executioners, shouting abuse and laughing whilst crowds of others watch in horrified silence, is an image that is indelibly stamped onto the minds of all Christians.

It occurred to me that when he had got on the train, he instinctively gravitated closer towards me, another human being, to share his evening. We humans are social animals, and contact with others is very important to us. Having sat down opposite me, he ate his dinner and enjoyed his daughter's laughter in my company.

What can be done to protect the children in Yemen? The warring parties and those advising them, including the United Kingdom, must work to ensure that civilians are neither killed nor injured, and that schools and hospitals are not bombed.

The international response to what took place and what continues to take place is both a travesty and injustice. Hundreds of thousands of Innocent men, women and children fled to neighbouring countries such as Chad and Cameroon but more than 600,000 people remain displaced inside the country with many trapped inside enclaves they cannot escape.